Category Archives: Evolution of the WWW

I’ve not been much of a fan of LinkedIn. It’s too closed off and there just aren’t enough ways to interact. I prefer networking through the likes of Twitter or Facebook.

One example is how easy it is to create a presence for your company or brand. Previously, LinkedIn only gave you the ability to create your personal profile. Facebook, on the other, with fan pages, makes it easy to both establish a brand presence and encourage people to interact.

The closed nature of LinkedIn alienated it from the rest of the social media space, in a way, because it didn’t allow much integration. On the other hand, services like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed have APIs and actively encourage integration with other services.

LinkedIn seemed to be saying “Nope, if you want to tell people what you’re doing, do it here.”

Now all that may be changing.

Three weeks ago, they launched their Applications platform. It’s not completely open, which is a shame, with applications having to go through LinkedIn approval, but it’s a start. I’ll be looking forward to the Twitter application (listen up LinkedIn staff!)

This week comes an bigger step and one that interests me even more: company profiles. I’ve created mine.

It does worry me how easy it is to create (or claim) a company profile, though. Which also means that it’s important that any company make sure they’re LinkedIn profile is looked after by someone in their organisation.

Even more so now that the profiles are public, as announced earlier today. Anybody searching for your company name may well come across your LinkedIn profile

With the very social, democratised internet we are experiencing, reputation management is a big concern. LinkedIn just added themselves to the list of sites to be on by default.

To my extreme satisfaction, The Guardian newspaper has become the first in the world to offer full text RSS feeds, representing a significant step in the evolution of the World Wide Web. This step should be a paradigm shift of sorts; the first domino to fall; and hopefully more newspapers will follow suit.

Full text feeds have been shyed away from because they offer much less in advertising revenue than on-page ads. Offering a summary instead forces readers to click-though from their feed reader to the full article.

This is a good example of where the user experience has been sacrificed for the sake of advertising revenue. Instead of directly giving the user what they want, the newspapers force a path to benefit themselves. Ultimately, this will only lead to dis-satisfaction and abandonment.

The Guardian, in opening up their RSS feeds, has invited much more user engagement. Users will be more likely to read the news articles and therefore much more likely to share and re-distribute over the social web. The Guardian will gain more exposure for it’s stories than before, giving a significant advantage over the competition.

Hopefully now other newspapers will follow the example, and deliver content in a way that remains true to the spirit of the open web.